Sat, 05 Feb 2011

New toy - A netbook with great battery life - 15:43
Before heading up to linux.conf.au a few weeks ago I was thinking
about the need to be able to keep using my laptop all day at the
conference. The battery in my XPS M1330 simply does not last that
long. Also commuting in the Brisbane heat carrying that, and a power
adapter along with the other stuff needed into the conference every
day seemed like overkill.

I have been reading about various netbooks for a while, and finally I
realised I have a good laptop for the things I need a laptop for
provided by work. However when travelling it is handy to have
something less important and expensive, with better battery
life. Everything else can be easily dealt with. The Samsung series of
netbooks regularly had the best battery life mentioned in reviews, so
looking at the models in stock at JB Hifi the NF 210 was claimed (by
Samsung) to have 14 hours. Most Linux reviewers of it seemed to
suggest 8 to 10 hours was the norm. So I headed over to buy one.

For AUD $437 I got a 1 GB RAM, 250 GB hdd, Atom N445 dual thread (I
think) netbook with a 1024x600 screen and a huge battery life with the
6 cell battery it came with. At lca I was able to leave the (rather
minimalist) power adapter where I was staying and just take the
netbook, it easily lasted the whole day open during all talks and
using wireless the whole time plus some other usage.

Gnome power battery status suggests 12 hours from 100% charge with the
screen on minimum brightness, right now I am typing this outdoors with
the screen at 50% the battery is at 50% and the report suggests 5
hours remaining. I installed a standard Debian Squeeze netinst install
off a usb stick and downloaded an identical set of packages (almost)
to those on my laptop, no need for a restricted environment as it is a
fairly powerful computer anyway. Pretty much everything has worked
well under Linux, the only slight complication was the need for a ppa
samsung-backlight deb to control the backlight from the keyboard. The
backlight seems to go dim on no use even when those options are not
selected in gnome power manager so also something that could be
investigated.

Also Paulus bought one and had a few problems with it freezing due to
the closed wireless firmware on resume from suspend it seemed. I have
had one lockup (possibly related) but it has not been a problem. The
wireless driver does need to be reloaded on resume from suspend before
it works (easy to do) but that is something I may be keen to look into
at some point. I should not be surprised though how easy it was to
have a capable working Linux system, that is often the norm with
hardware these days (especially with much better/broader driver
support than any other operating system).

For getting around the place some light work (compiling, interpreters,
emacs, web browser, etc) it is a capable system and not lacking. I am
a happy purchaser, even though my first one had to be returned within
three hours of purchase due to a failed hard disk, since then it has
been excellent.